1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to network communications and, more particularly, to a method and system for securing user identity and privacy while facilitating communications between user and content providers.
2. Description of Related Art
Recent growth in the telecommunications industry has ushered in a new era of convenience and productivity. With the widespread availability of wireless and Internet communications, as well as the continued use of more conventional communication technology, users can now readily access information over communication networks from virtually any location and at virtually any time.
In typical practice, a user will operate a client station to communicate with a content server operated by a content provider. Through use of the client station, the user might send a request for information to the content server. And the content server might then responsively send the requested information to the client station, for presentation to the user.
The user's request to the content provider and the content provider's response to the user could travel over the same or different networks. Further, the request and response could occur within a single session between the user and content provider, or the request could occur within one session and the response could then occur within another session. And still further, the user could send a request from one client station and receive a response at another client station, and the content provider could receive a request at one server and send a response from another server. Other variations are possible as well.
In Internet communications, for example, a user could direct his or her client station to send a request for web content over a packet-switched network to a web server, and the web server could then send the web content over the network to the requesting client station. Conventionally, the client and server could communicate with each other according to the industry standard hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). According to HTTP, for instance, the client could send an HTTP “GET” request that identifies the desired content. And the server could then send an HTTP “200 OK” response that defines the designated content by a set of markup language (e.g., HTML, WML, HDML, XHDML, cHTML or VXML). A browser running on the user's client station could then interpret the markup language and present the requested content to the user.
Alternatively, after receiving the user's HTTP GET request, the content provider could send the user an HTTP 200 OK response that simply acknowledges the user's request rather than providing the requested content. And at some later point, such as when the information becomes available, the server could then generate and send an e-mail message, phone call, short message service (SMS) message, or other sort of communication to the user, providing the user with the requested content.
A problem with existing communication arrangements, however, is that they allow content providers to easily track user activity. The reason for this is that user communications to content providers frequently identify the user, in order to facilitate response communications from the content providers to the user. For example, given the identity of a user, a content provider might query an information-database to obtain information about the user (such as the user's current location), and the content provider might then customize content based on the acquired information and send the customized content to the user. And as another example, given the identity of a user, the content provider might be able to initiate a communication, such as an e-mail message, phone call or SMS message to that user.
Unfortunately, each time a content provider receives such a communication from a given user, the content provider can easily log the fact that the user sent the communication. And each time the content provider sends content to the user in response to such a communication, the content provider can similarly log the fact that the content was sent to the user. Provided with this information, a content provider can then readily build user profiles and demographic databases, which many people consider to be an invasion of user privacy or otherwise undesirable.